Posts published by Liesl Schillinger

How a small Italian press managed to turn works in translation into a form of social currency.

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Europa Editions’ books have a visual identity that’s as distinct as their literary sensibility.Credit Marko Metzinger

Recently, something improbable happened in the literary world: Europa Editions — a small, Italian-born publisher — became, of all things, a coveted intellectual brand. We don’t like to think a book’s cover matters too much, yet the decade-old press has somehow become as much of a name as its authors. Readers have taken to Instagramming its titles to broadcast their cultural verve and savoir faire, and to displaying their book while out at a restaurant, perched on the edge of a table for all to admire.

Even if you haven’t heard of Europa Editions, you’ve probably heard of some of its hits. There’s Muriel Barbery’s “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” (more than a million copies sold); Jane Gardam’s “Old Filth” (now in its 20th printing); and Alexander Maksik’s “You Deserve Nothing” (so far, the biggest title by an American). Like any good branded product, the books have an instantly recognizable visual stamp: stiff paper covers edged with white borders that frame color-drenched matte backgrounds. According to Europa’s Australian-born editor in chief, Michael Reynolds, “When you see them all together, they draw you in like a bowl of candy.” Read more…

Nicholas Mele’s photograph series of unconventional and unpretentious kitchens in Newport, R.I., mansions, or "cottages," as they’re called.Credit Nicholas Mele

The waves are scraping their pebbled heels on the welcome mats of beaches; hydrangeas flirt demurely from the lawns of country houses. Oh what joy — after the long, worky winter, to swim and sail, thwack balls over nets, sink toes into sand and loll with friends on balmy blue-skied days and firefly-flecked nights. Pause the fantasy. Even on vacation, you’ve got to eat, and in all probability that means at some stage, whether as a host or guest, rising at dawn or cutting short a sunny afternoon to toil over a hot stove, get meals on and set the table. Read more…

ONCE UPON A TIME, in a land far away, there lived a girl as beautiful as a sunset on the Seine. She was tall and slender, with long, dark hair and mysterious, ice-blue eyes, and she was called Cécilia. Her father, a furrier, was descended from Bessarabian gypsies and her mother was the granddaughter of a great Spanish composer, but they brought up Cécilia and her three older brothers in Paris, in a grand apartment. The little girl grew up surrounded by love, comfort and gaiety, both in the city and in her family’s country house, which looked a little bit like a castle, and had a high stone wall around it. Cécilia was not spoiled — she worked hard on her lessons and practiced piano every day for hours, but her parents doted upon her, and friends and even strangers admired her, falling under the spell of her beauty. Yet, as she grew into a young woman, Cécilia yearned to find her one true love.

At 20, she thought she had found him when a handsome photographer named Jean-Daniel dropped by her father’s fur boutique, snapped her picture for French Vogue, and whisked her away to Venice on the Orient Express. They decided to marry. Cécilia and her mother chose her wedding gown and prepared an opulent trousseau. Hélas, her fiancé vanished like a cloud of fairy dust.

A few years later, Cécilia found a more determined swain — a jocular television star named Jacques, who cooked her poularde de Bresse en vessie and écrevisses à la nage and dazzled her with his confidence. The man who married them in 1984, the mayor of the elegant Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, fell in love with the bride while he was performing the ceremony, but sadly, Nicolas, the mayor, could not marry Cécilia. For one thing, he had just married her to somebody else; for another, he too was married. But never mind: In Paris, anything is possible, with the invincible power of amour. Read more…

Can a meal be more than just a delicious coming together of fine ingredients? Can it alter your feelings in predictive ways? The Michelin-starred chef Joël Robuchon and his neuropharmacologist have created dishes to cure what ails you. Plus: A trout recipe that will make you happier.

Travel by foot leaves an imprint on the memory, and slows down time for a precious moment.

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SOLE MAN Patrick Leigh Fermor at the Rila Monastery in Bulgaria during his trek through Europe in 1934.Credit Patrick Leigh Fermor Papers, John Murray Archive, the National Library of Scotland

To read a book about the pleasures, epiphanies and mettlesome feats someone has accumulated over the course of an incredibly long walk is to be fascinated, jealous and, most of all, incredulous. Who has time to walk, in this overscheduled age? I always seem to be running, not walking, whenever I happen to be at large on two feet, suffused with a cold-sweat adrenaline panic that I’ll be late to whatever the next vital thing is, miss the train, the flight, the crucial email, the fateful encounter or just closing time at the grocery store. It’s one thing to distractedly click on an Instagram photo or a Facebook note a friend has posted of a breathtaking scene or enviable meal he’s scored on a far-flung holiday; that doesn’t jolt us from our harried workday routines. We absorb them half-consciously before checking Twitter, then return dutifully to our inboxes. The literature of walking shakes us out of this world set on whir, nudging us into a parallel universe where days are measured not by the messages on the screen, but by the rising and setting of the sun.

Both consolation and inspiration can come from reading the unrushed accounts of observant souls who found a way to live, for a while, in slow motion; on the other hand, those satisfactions are mingled with the mournful recognition that most of us who read these books — and there are so many of them — will never manage to do what their authors did: to slow down and lead a proper, examined human life in the manner of the togaed philosophers, drinking in the natural world and nursing introspective reveries footfall by footfall. Envy kicks in at the thought that anyone, in any era, had the luxury of detaching himself from the daily grind for weeks, months, even years at a time. Are long-distance walkers more antisocial than most people? More enlightened? Or are they just luckier? Read more…

The writer Liesl Schillinger shares the process that produced her illustrated volume of newly minted expressions for describing contemporary life (“cancellelation,” “occuplaytion”), and lists 10 personal favorites.

Moldova to Micronesia. Bombay to Burma. East Timor to South Sudan. For well-traveled sophisticates, the world is an ever-shifting big geography lesson.

Anyone can go to Paris, London, Rio de Janeiro or Beijing (ancestral home of Peking duck); but one day I would really like to go to Lodz, pronounced “woodge,” in Poland, so that when I come back and tell my friends where I’ve been, nobody will have the slightest idea where I was. It would also be fun to go to Lviv, Ukraine (formerly known as Lwow, Poland), for the same reason. There, though, it would be difficult. Would I call it luh-VIEW or luh-VEEFF (both pronunciations are allowed)?

In the game of one-upmanship furtively practiced by travelers, no victory is sweeter than visiting a place whose correct pronunciation is only known by the well-traveled few (and of course, by natives), and whose location is mysterious: Bazaruto beats Bermuda; the Marianas trump Miami. This honor is magnified if the country or city has recently changed its name, especially if there is debate over which name should be used, once you figure out how to pronounce it. This may partially explain why so many people rushed to explore Slovenia, Croatia and the Dalmatian coast after Yugoslavia ceased to exist, qua nation, in the 1990s: They wanted to be among the first to set foot on the rebaptized new slices, so they could return home bearing the proud souvenir of the right way to say Hvar (“hfar”) and Brac. (Do not be misled by the YouTube tutorial on the pronunciation of Brac, which is completely wrong: The Croatian island is pronounced “brotch.”) Read more…